What recession? Sen. Chris Dodd can do the impossible!

While everybody has been belly-aching about foreclosures and plummeting property values, the wise Connecticut senator, Chris Dodd, has literally performed a miracle.

Wolfie will have to check with IrishCentral's own Father Tim, but I am pretty sure we will soon be seeing a new "St. Christopher" statue on our dashboards. (As you may know, the old St. Christopher was de-sainted by the Vatican after it was revealed he was a member of the Orange Order. I guess the Vatican has enough fruitcakes! Ha! But I digress...)

Like the parting of the Red Sea and the '69 Mets, Sen Dodd's miracle is truly one for the record books.

Like so many people, the forward-thinking Senator sought a deserved piece of the good life as the reign of the Celtic Tiger dawned, and bought a humble cottage in a run-down urban neighborhood on Inishnee, County Galway. Unlike many who made similar investments out of pure greed and speculation, Sen. Dodd wanted only a simple Irish home with a warm fire and a Jacuzzi and more rooms than all the Hiltons for his old age, once his service to his country and/or prison sentence was over.

In 2002, Dodd had this wreck of a 1,200-square-foot home appraised at $190,000. And it was appraised using Ireland's time-tested, official and accepted methods of property valuation, which are the same as used by the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee. And I think we all know what that means.

Now, few can expect a busy Washington government official and chairman of 11 multinational corporations like Sen. Dodd to keep his nose in the obscure, quill-penned accountancy ledgers in Dublin day after day. And, likely unbeknownst to him, the dilapidated property may have experienced a slight increase in value as a handful of similar properties in Ireland did, some by as a much as a thousand billion percent. But heck, that's just the wild, wacky world of real estate for you!

So now, the usual idiots (Republicans) in Washington are trying to make a big deal out of the fact that a recent appraisal of this crumbling shack puts its value around $658,000, which some mathematicians and eggheads claim is a 300 percent jump. Other Washington busybodies, many of them not Irish by the way, are on the verge of implying that Sen. Dodd should have reported this incremental adjustment in value, and have raised other not-yet-but-possibly-will be-very-soon-proven charges about the "shady businessman" from Kansas City with whom he originally purchased the timber-and-asphalt hovel. (Mr. Capone was not available for comment at press time.)

Well, Wolfie hates to rain on their parade, but isn't it possible that good, old-fashioned hard work and sweat is what turned this Galway fixer-upper into a halfway-decent mansion? Do you think those marble fountains just moved in by themselves? Sure they did! The same way that the historic oil painting of George Washington that used to hang in the Senate somehow magically nailed itself to the wall of the good Senator's retirement home! This, and a million other examples of modest improvements and desperately needed upgrades I could name, was w-o-r-k, folks! And that's what turned this dump around.

I would be remiss in my duty as, well, a dog, if I did not point out that Sen. Dodd's backbreaking work on this twig hut was not a one-man enterprise -- but a project he shared with the woman of his dreams. And his wife helped out, too -- despite the ravages of disease that have forced her to sit on the boards of three giant healthcare companies, which pay her some sort of modest stipend.

And so, my friends, we can see now just how unfounded this witch-hunt is, and instead, realize that "Saint Chris" Dodd has shown us the path that will lead us out of this worldwide depression. Let's follow the example of this numerical miracle-worker and real-estate mastermind, and put all this "I've been forced out of the house my family lived in for 250 years" wailing behind us!

"Go, Dodd!" is what The Wolfhound has adopted as his new motto -- and remember, you can't spell "God" without it!